Reverse Engineering
by sparrowlately
Summary: Sam storms out in 2012, and gets lost in 1987. Or, procrastinating!Sparrow tries de-aging!fic, kind of.


**Title**: Reverse Engineering  
**Rating**: PG-13  
**Words**: 4,545  
**Spoilers**: Vague, but for all aired episodes.  
**Warnings**: Language and some neglectful parenting about in line with what we've seen on the show.  
**Summary**: Sam storms out in 2012, and gets lost in 1987.  
**Neurotic author's notes**: I'm alive! If hungover and sick. But alive! I've been buried in work and illness, but I have persevered and I'm not 100% pleased with this, but it's been sitting on my desktop for a while and it's probably as good as it's gonna get, so here, have my attempt at the de-aging!fic. Blaaargh.

:::

Sam is not so arrogant to claim moral high ground over his brother, nor will he ever be again. The days of a cut-and-dry morality of any sort are long gone insofar as Sam's concerned, and he knows he can't really pull a face and claim some kind of ethical superiority ever again.

He knows it, and yet sometimes Dean is just a _dick_. And an idiot.

There's a Benny-shaped elephant in the room, not to mention a void between them the size of Amelia and one year away. Sam doesn't want to fight—Christ, is he sick of fighting—and he knows, on some level, he can hardly begrudge Dean for doing what he had to do in the belly of the whale. God knows when your back's against a wall you take any help you can get. And it's not as if he spent the year pining for Dean. Or, not pining alone, at any rate.

But Amelia was a lady with a job and a dog. Benny is a fucking _monster_. It makes Sam's blood boil, and it makes him scared—Dean's Ruby-related defense is doing anything to placate him, it only serves as a reminder that friendships with monsters are rarely beneficial, and also that Sam is not really as good at flying solo as he likes to think. The whole thing just leaves his stomach twisting and casts a sour shadow over those glowing memories of good times with Amelia.

And so tensions reach boiling point, spill over, and they hurl some petty insults at one another before Sam is storming out, slamming the door behind him, leaving a red-faced Dean and an awkward, hovering Cas in his wake.

He's not sure what the plan was, but in the end he finishes off the spectacularly bad evening in true Winchester fashion—in some low-slung local-color bar in the dried-out heart of central Ohio, three sheets to the wind, trying to pick monsters out of the late-Thursday crowd, seething in his quiet way, yearning somehow simultaneously for Amelia's slender form curled against him in a warm bed and for that metal-and-leather Dean smell and miles of open road. He's dimly aware that he's talking to someone, possibly cursing and possibly saying too much, and then everything is over bright and slanting and he's out.

:::

He becomes aware first of his headache, and then of the scrambling and scuffling happening nearby. He is _hungover_, and even the thought of prying his eyes open strikes him as profoundly unpleasant. After a moment, he manages to conclude that he is slumped against a wall, very possibly outdoors, and he wonders if he passed out on his way back to the motel. Dean is going to kill him.

"Hey."

A high, thin voice interrupts his musings, and then somebody is nudging his shoulder, shyly—

"_Hey_."

There's something distantly familiar in the insistent tone, and Sam wonders if he ended up in someone's house last night, or outside of it. Before he can make it much past that embarrassing notion the feather-light touch on his shoulder is replaced by something heavier, firmer, and the prodding is more aggressive, and is that a _gun_?

Sam's eyes fly open. He is indeed on a porch, and someone is poking at his shoulder with the butt of a sawed-off shotgun, and that someone is so slight and low to the ground that Sam's initial glance missed him entirely and he has to drop his head down and squint, miserably, and wait for his vision to focus.

"What're you doing here? You gotta go. My dad's gonna kick your ass."

Someone very young, doing their best to sound gruff and intimidating, and again that voice is so familiar. Sam shakes his head and raises a hand to push the shotgun away. The kid flinches back, just for an instant, then refocuses, steadying his aim.

"Kid, you don't need to shoot me," says Sam, in what he hopes is a reassuring voice, or at least an acceptable volume. "I just got lost."

The kid makes a derisive little noise and keeps the gun steady as Sam tries to shove himself up the side of the house into a more upright position. "Yeah, _lost_," he says, "bet you've got a—a bitch of a hangover." There's something desperately sad in the way the kid is clearly parroting someone else's slang—Sam can easily remember the first time he let loose an overwrought "son of a bitch" or a tentative "gank the ugly bastard"—and again there is that gnawing, cloying familiarity in the boy's voice, or cadence. Sam wonders blearily if they've met on a case before, then wonders why the kid wants to shoot him with a gun that's almost comically too large for him.

Swallowing, he finds he can't quite stand up to this elementary school kid's challenge of a hangover, so he instead makes to stand up. "I'm really sorry," he says, "I just got lost. I'm leaving, okay?"

The kid is still holding the shotgun level with his own face, but he nods quickly. From inside the house another small voice calls "Was' happening out dere?"

Before Sam can process the overwhelming pang of something that might be nostalgia that hits him just then, the kid is lowering his weapon, turning and addressing the screen door. "Nothin', Sammy. Stay inside, I'll be back in jus' a second."

_Sammy?_

And then Sam looks at the kid, really looks, and is struck immediately with an overpowering wave of vertigo, followed very shortly by a desperate need to vomit. He grins the porch railing and stares, shaking a little, at the freckled, scrawny child who is fumbling to hoist the heavy gun back up to aim at Sam, his chapped lower lip caught in his teeth.

"De—I—_Dean_?" Sam rasps, wholly unable to comprehend what he's seeing. _I'm hallucinating again_, he thinks wildly, o_r this is—a trick, a—a—an angel fucking with me. A hallucination, or one bitch of a hangover, or—_

"You needa leave _now_," says the kid—says _Dean_—pointing the gun again at his brother, this intruder, tiny face red with indignation and, Sam realizes belatedly, fear. "Now! My dad's gonna kick your ass, he's gonna be down in jus' a minute!"

"No he's not," says Sam, dazedly, and little Dean goes ballistic.

With an alarming _crack_ he's discarded the gun—some part of Sam wants to have a gun-safety-related freak out before he remembers it's a _kid_—and has launched himself at Sam with astonishing energy, his skinny little body flailing wildly as he tries to shove Sam off the porch. "Go right now or my dad is gonna kick your ass!" he yells one more time, before Sam snaps out of his surprised stupor and sweeps down, catching Dean's wrists in his hands. He's struck by how _small_Dean is, thin and almost brittle, and how enormous Sam must seem by comparison. He crouches as low as he can, so he's looking up at the still-furiously-struggling boy.

"Calm down," says Sam, levelly, trying to make eye contact, "it's okay, listen, Dean, I—I know your dad, alright? I'm—um—" _Fuck it. _He leans closer, and says in as close to a conspiratorial whisper as he can pull off at this junction, "I'm a hunter, okay, Dean? And I—I'm looking for John Winchester. Someone said he was the man to talk to about—um"—he grasps wildly for a believable lie as Dean begins to calm down—"about crossroad demons."

Dean stills and looks at him then, and Sam is hit with another wave of dizziness and uncanny nausea as he sees his older brother's eyes peering out of this little boy's face. His thin wrists are still trapped in Sam's giant hands, and Sam tries to give the boy's arms a reassuring rub with his thumbs, but it must have come off creepy as Dean stiffens immediately. Sam stops and swallows. He doesn't know what he can say that won't wreck the tenuous truce, but he's saved by the screen door smacking open and—

Sam releases Dean's wrists immediately, stands up on instinct then rocks on his heels, caught between a desire to back away and to dash forward because there, on the porch, in an oversize Marines t-shirt and socks scrunched around his ankles, is tiny, round, earnest Sammy Winchester, knuckle in his mouth and face still soft and sleepy.

Sam is working to swallow the strange lump in his throat while little Dean is already shepherding his brother inside, promises of Lucky Charms and _Transformers_enticing the little boy back inside. He wobbles a little, still just small, and Dean catches his hand without a second thought and they walk into the house together, chatting idly, Sammy gazing up at his brother with pure adoration, Dean beaming down at Sammy like he's the most wonderful thing in the world. Sam, his heart curiously lodged in his throat and pounding, stays where he is on the porch for what feels like a very long time before Dean reemerges, alone again, having shrugged an oversize jacket on over his jeans and raggedy shirt.

_I know that jacket_, Sam thinks dumbly, _you'll have it for another two years at least. Army surplus. Big pockets._

"My dad is coming back real soon," says Dean carefully, his small fingers scrunching up the ends of the jacket's sleeves so they won't fall over his hands. "This is Fred's house, but he's a"—Dean cocks his eyebrows in a little _you know_gesture and Sam's heart does something strange and wriggly—"too, so it's okay. Sammy—m'brother—doesn't know about any of that, so can it, okay? Nothin' about anything, I mean it."

Sam nods, his throat dry. "Is Fred here?" he asks, for lack of anything better to say, nearly two decades of consistent lying compelling him to keep his story straight even now.

"Yeah," says Dean, and when Sam opens his mouth the kid's little face falls and he says, "No. But he's gonna be back soon, too."

"How long's it been just you and your brother?" asks Sam, concern knotting in his stomach. He remembers being alone with Dean for days at a time, but when they were so small?

Dean shifts uncomfortably. "Jus' today," Dean says, a terrible liar, and then he straightens up and says, "I'm going back inside. You can wait out here, okay?"

Sam nods, still feeling like he's dreaming, still not sure he isn't. He watches as Dean, skinny and slight in a way he never remembers his brother being, slides back inside, and tries to reconcile this boy with the towering big brother of his memory. He can hear Dean and Sammy—_Dean and me_, he thinks, and his head hurts—conversing just inside. Sammy is babbling happily, pausing only to giggle at Dean's occasional interjections or to try, with earnest if fleeting concentration, to copy after Dean as Dean pushes down hard on his _th_sounds and asks Sammy to repeat.

"Ano_th_er, Sammy," Dean is saying, overemphasizing the middle syllable. It's an intimately, overwhelmingly familiar sound, even though Sam had forgotten he used to do that.

"Anover," Sammy repeats happily, and Dean tries once more—"Bite and blow, Sammy, 'member?"—before giving up and allowing Sammy to continue his story.

Sometime later, Dean comes back onto the porch, carrying a newspaper. "Here," he says, handing it to Sam, who's sitting on the porch, leaning up against the side of the house. "If you're bored, you can…" He trails off awkwardly and Sam, his heart oddly warmed, takes the paper and smiles.

"Thanks, Dean," he says, and glances at the date. September, 1987. _How in the hell._

"How'd you know my name?" Dean asks, not making eye contact but glaring at Sam all the same.

"Oh," says Sam, "you know, you're John Winchester's boys. People know about—Dean and Sammy Winchester."

"Yeah?" says Dean, harsh suspicion giving way to a curious, childish lilt. "Lotsa people know about my dad, right?"

"Oh, yeah," says Sam, whose traitorous throat has once again developed an impressive lump. "John Winchester and his—his sons? Legends, man."

A pleased smile is tugging at the corner of Dean's lips, and it's absolutely adorable. Sam is caught between the overwhelming knowledge that this is his _brother_and a tugging affection for this awkward little boy.

"Was' your name anyways?" Dean asks after a minute.

There's a sweet interest in his face, and it's so familiar and warm and safe that Sam hasn't had the time to consider a lie before the truth is spilling out of his mouth. "It's Sam," he says.

Dean's face splits into a radiant grin. "Thas' my brother's name," he says, reverently, and his fondness is so total, so, well, childlike, that Sam can't help giving him a matching grin. A surge of affection bubbles up inside him, and it's all he can do to keep from reaching out to ruffle little Dean's hair.

_This boy is your big brother_, he reminds himself, firmly, _and you're right inside, watching cartoons about robots_. "I know it is," he says, and Dean's smile falters. He folds back into himself, shyly. Sam feels bad immediately, but then Dean slides down the wall to sit down next to Sam.

"But you're not like Sammy," says Dean thoughtfully, and Sam turns to look at him, his heart once again doing its writhing best to beat right out of his chest. "You're so big," says Dean softly, and Sam has to laugh. Once he starts it's hard to stop, and then he's throwing his head back and letting out a belly laugh, only stopping when he realizes Dean's ears are pink and he's folded back in on himself.

"Was' goin' on out dere?" comes Sammy's voice from inside, in what is clearly his best imitation of a sitcom mother's indigent holler. Or Dean's.

"Nothing, Sammy," call Dean and Sam in unison, and something joyful takes flight in Sam's chest just as something else tears in two.

Sammy gives a contented hum and presumably turns his attention back to _Transformers_, and the Sam and Dean on the porch fall into contemplative silence. Dean is picking at his shoelace, and Sam is remembering the way their father used to scold him—_Can you sit still for three damn seconds, Dean?_—and also straining to remember anything in particular about this time at Fred's. There had to be a reason, he figured, that he'd landed here. Something must have happened.

But insofar as he can remember there's nothing special about September of '87 in Ohio. It's him and Dean holed up together for days on end. It's Dean supplying the steady diet of cartoons and cereal, and judging by the state of Dean's t-shirt, he hasn't mastered laundry yet. Sam's fairly certain he can recall a second-hand memory of meeting Bobby around this time, but they're still a year away from the shtriga incident, and four years removed from Mary's death—and that shocks him for a moment, to think that less than half a decade ago his mother was alive and well. But there's nothing extraordinary slated to happen here, at Fred Jones's house the autumn of his fourth year. Not that he can remember.

This leaves him with little to do but contemplate Dean, who is fidgeting all the more intently with his lace, worrying his bottom lip. He's wiry and freckled, one of his canines is missing when he grins—and his smile is so loose and open when it emerges, which appears to be only for Sammy. It's his brother, certainly, and it takes him a moment to realize this is the Dean who still resides in his memory, who he still expects to exist, this pillar of his world, this boy who will do anything to take care of him, whose whole life revolves around him. This little boy, who can aim a shotgun at a stranger and lie through his teeth to CPS and make a mean bowl of Chef Boyardee—this was his idolized big brother. Just a skinny kid without a clue what he's doing.

"Are you a dad?" Dean asks suddenly, his attention still devoted solely to his frayed shoe.

"What?"

Dean turns pink and tucks his chin down, hiding his face. "Nothin'," he says, and Sam can't say why, but he feels like an ass.

"No, I'm not," he says, and he wants to add something to the effect of _but you don't have to feel bad for asking_, but doesn't know how, and so instead they lapse back into silence.

"How come you've gotta ask my dad 'bout crossroad demons?" Dean asks after a little while.

"I just got a question for him," says Sam distantly. The very real possibility that he might encounter his father—a thirty-three year old John Winchester, father of two small boys and only three-odd years into his lauded hunting career, utterly unaware of who he is going to become, of the sons he is going to raise and lose and die for—is only now sinking in, and it's like getting hit in the chest with a salt round. He feels winded at the very idea of his dad—and what did Dad even _look_like then, younger than Sam would remember but so much older than the last time he'd seen him, an ignorant pawn of Heaven and Hell back in 1978?—pulling up in the Impala—and it was John's, then, not Dean's—strolling up Fred Jones's long dusty driveway and halting at the sight of this stranger.

_Will he know me?_ Sam wondered. _Will he see himself, and Mom, in my face?_ He swallowed. _Dad_, he thought, suddenly, wildly, _Dad, come home, it's me, you need to see me and know me. Dad, come on, we're waiting. Me and Dean._

But that wasn't right. Dean was waiting, and would keep on waiting, and Sammy, contented inside with his cartoons and his _brover_, would learn not to bother waiting up for his daddy in a way Dean never had. The thought made him profoundly sad, if only for a moment, and then Dean said, "Well, my dad says he's gon' kill every last demon in the lower forty-eight."

Something wriggles and twists in Sam's chest. He remembers that, starkly, now, though he'd forgotten—Dad had never said it to him, but Dean, in the weak dawn light the day after Christmas, the day after Sam had found out about Dad and monsters, Dean had promised him—"When we were little, Dad used to say he was gonna kill every last demon in the lower forty-eight, Sammy. It's okay. He's gonna."

"Yeah?" he asks Dean, and Dean nods emphatically, looking up at Sam with wide, reverent eyes.

"My dad was in 'Nam and he knows all 'bout killing bastards," he says, the edges of a mischievous smile tugging at his lips. Sam is bracing himself against a memory, sudden and vivid, and pressing himself up against his brother in a closet or a cupboard, both very small and in pajamas, and over some sound outside Dean was whispering in his ear, "You're Daddy on a mission, okay, Sammy, gotta be real quiet, we're Daddy on a mission in 'Nam."

Dean's ragged little grin has faded and he's back to picking at his lace, and Sam is sort of amazed at how shy he is. The Dean he remembers was always talking, bouncing off the walls and bursting with pranks and jokes and stories. Then again, that was for his—Sammy's—benefit. Now he's a stranger.

Sam takes a moment to get accustomed to the shaky feeling of being a stranger to Dean.

"So you're a hunter?" Dean asks, staring out at Fred's driveway.

"Yeah," says Sam softly, sitting on his hands so he won't fix the rumpled collar of Dean's jacket.

"I'm gonna be, umm, a hunter, too," says Dean, "or maybe, maybe a fireman."

"Yeah?" asks Sam, pleased to be engaging the kid, some immature part of him rebelling at the very idea that Dean ever considered any career besides hunting.

_A fireman,_Sam thinks, and decides that somebody is definitely fucking with him, now. Even if it is just the universe.

"Yeah," says Dean, a little more animatedly, "and, and Sammy wants to be a vet'narian. So maybe, maybe I can be that. Or he can be a fireman with me. Or he can be a vet and I'll be a fireman. And maybe like, if there's an animal I gotta take out of a burning house, I can bring it to Sammy and he'll make it better." He's looking up at Sam now, earnest and dangerously cute, grinning around a gap in his teeth. Sam is straining to remember Dean's fireman phase to no avail, though he does remember wanting to be a vet, and begging for a dog, and Dean explaining to the utmost patience that _dogs needa run around and pee outside, Sammy, and you can't do that in a car, okay?_

"That's a good plan, Dean," says Sam, and Dean positively lights up. That makes Sam's heart ache a bit, too; he'd forgotten how ecstatically Dean used to respond to praise. He can remember Bobby telling Dean he was a smart one, once, when they were a little older, and the way Dean's whole body had puffed up with pride and the way he'd tried to hide his grin as he ate his dinner. That same muted smile is wiggling its way onto his face now, and it's addicting. "I bet you'd make a really good fireman. Or vet. Or anything else."

Dean keeps looking down, embarrassed, then back up at Sam, the sweetest little self-conscious expression unfolding over his face. "Yeah?" he says, very softly, and his lip catches under his teeth again.

"Oh, yeah, for sure," says Sam, "I mean, you're—"

He stops, and wonders what he can say. _You're gonna do great_ seems like a platitude, and _you're gonna be an awesome fireman_is just unkind, given what he knows of Dean and what his life will become.

Dean is turning pinker and his grin is fading, so Sam says, "You're great, Dean, I can tell. You're very smart."

Denial and pride briefly war with one another on Dean's face before he ducks his head and says softly, "No'm not."

"Yes, you are," says Sam, firmly, remembering how often Dean—and everyone else—had said _Sammy_was the smart one. Sam was smart, Dean was strong. Brain and brawn, the brothers Winchester. Out to kill every last demon in the lower forty-eight.

The boy next to Sam is eight, and doesn't yet know more about vintage cars than most working mechanics. He can't reverse engineer an EMF meter yet, nor convert a walkman into one. Sam certainly hopes he can't make a bomb. His whole life is reheated ravioli and kid's cartoons, working the tangles out of Sammy's hair and target practice with his Dad. His whole life is a car chuck full of weapons and Legos.

"You are, Dean," he says, "you're smart and you're good and you're gonna be great."

Dean's voice is small but brimming with poorly suppressed pleasure. "Yeah? Think I could be a hunter?"

"Yes," says Sam, a little thickly, not caring if he seems stupid or crazy or girly, he's hungover and the universe is fucking with him and his big brother is really very small, "the very best."

"My dad's the very best," he says, automatically but sincerely, like it's the only thing he knows. It might be.

"For now," says Sam.

Dean's little head is listing onto Sam's shoulder, and something in Sam's chest is doing its damnedest to explode right out. Sam can remember this, pitching to the side and resting his head on Dean's shoulder, in the back of the car and on couches and porches and stairwells their whole life, until he got too big and old for things like that. This is the Winchester recovery position, and Sam can't help it—he puts an arm around Dean's shoulders, and Dean tenses for an instant then relaxes. Sam wonders if he's really this starved for a little approval, or if some part of him recognizes his brother in this oversized stranger. He winces, and doesn't know which to hope for.

"Me and Sammy," says Dean, after a moment, "me an' my brother, we can be hunters together, I bet. Thas' what Caleb said. Said we could be like a team."

"Is that what you want, Dean?" Sam asks, before he can stop himself. Some wild part of him is entertaining the notion of _saving these kids_, of gathering these two boys to his chest and just getting the hell away, going somewhere, somewhere even John couldn't find them. It's absurd, it's impossible, and part of him can see it now, he and Dean and little Sammy—_that's me in there_, he thinks—on a bus headed west, with two decades to set right what all went wrong.

"Me an' Sammy are already a team," says Dean, sort of sleepily, and he almost unconsciously scrubs his face against Sam's sleeve, then after a moment he adds, "so yeah."

The lump is back in Sam's throat, and he sits very still with Dean and watches the unmoving road and the stark November horizon, the faint sounds of Sammy's cartoons washing over them as the wind picks up and Dean slides off to sleep burrowed against Sam, and they stay there for a very long time before Sam looks up to see Cas standing on the porch, a curious, sorry look on his face, his head tilted to the side and his hand outstretched. Sam, at a loss, takes it, and he almost tells Cas he's sorry, that he got lost, but he's afraid to wake Dean, so he lets Cas pull him to his feet and lets him take them home.


End file.
